


1. California Girls

by darthjamtart



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Collection: Purimgifts Day 1, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-24
Updated: 2010-02-24
Packaged: 2017-10-07 12:31:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/65181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darthjamtart/pseuds/darthjamtart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Uhura and Gaila</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. California Girls

**Author's Note:**

  * For [singlecrow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/gifts).



"...how long were you a slave?" Uhura hears as the door swishes open, and she turns on her heel and walks right back out into the corridor. Not every guy asks Gaila that question -- some of them think they're subtle, sidling up to Uhura in the cafeteria to inquire about her roommate. She likes Gaila, most of the time, as a roommate, as a friend, but there are things she won't miss, after they graduate.

"I'm studying xenolinguistics and she's studying computer science," Uhura snaps, the eighth time some cadet leans in close across a table in the library to ask what it was like, being an Orion slave girl. "The comparative anthropology section is over there." She points, and the straight line of her extended arm is a command that cannot be disobeyed.

"I don't understand why you keep sleeping with these assholes," Uhura mutters, turning back to her notes. When she looks up, Gaila is watching the backside of the retreating cadet.

"It's not like I'm any more interested in them as people than they are in me," Gaila murmurs. She tucks a few bright red curls behind the curve of her green ear. The skin there is slightly darker, a mossy shade. On Orion, there are thirty-seven different words for green, each one a slightly different hue, with a slightly different connotation. None of them are associated with anything negative, rather, they reflect a cultural appreciation for the sensual: green in broad daylight, green under a starlit sky, green in the flickering shadows cast by a lover's lamp. Green that invites a touch, a taste, the color of the skin on the back of someone's neck, behind the curve of the knee.

_I am black but comely,_ Uhura thinks. _O, ye daughters of Jerusalem._

Human trafficking hasn't existed on Earth for over a century, and it's been three times that since Uhura's skin would have marked her as a slave in this country. She thinks sometimes that the cadets who stare at Gaila have forgotten their own history, as though California has always existed the way it is now, Starfleet Academy's interspecies integration policies rendering traditional racism a thing of the past.

"Do any of them even ask what you're studying?" she asks Gaila, and immediately wishes she could take back the question.

"One of them will, someday," Gaila says, after a moment. She smiles again, slightly wistful, and Uhura closes her textbook -- Romulan grammar, nothing she doesn't already know -- and rests her chin on her hand, one elbow propped on the table.

Orion has sixteen words for sex and none for rape. If Gaila wants to give the other cadets something to gossip about, that's her choice. "You want to grab a beer?" Uhura asks, and Gaila can't put her work away fast enough.

"Can we go to the same place as last time? That bartender was cute."

_Et introduxit me in cubiculum suum,_ Uhura thinks, and says, "His place. You promised, no more guys in our room."

"Bossy," Gaila comments, but her eyes are sparkling.

_Nigra sum sed formosa,_, Uhura thinks. There are twenty-two words for slave on Orion, and not one of them applies to Gaila anymore. _O filiae Ierusalem_. She looks up at the sky as they exit the library, Venus bright on the horizon. Beside her, Gaila chatters happily about the class she's taking on antique computer systems. Next year they'll be gone, assigned to a starship and light years past Venus.

Uhura's studied eight alien languages and four human ones, but the words are meaningless without context. She hopes that at least one of those cadets who looks at Gaila like a novelty is on that starship with her, so she can see his face when he realizes he's not in California anymore.

 

[Graphic 1](http://i48.tinypic.com/epityo.jpg)


End file.
